See also: Matt’s Picks
The most charming kids book I read this year (original review). Delphine Durand’s illustrations are pure joy, and could melt the heart of anyone who forgot how much fun drawing can be.
A beautiful love letter to engravings, bookmaking, and language from bookmaker John M. Carrera, Pictorial Webster’s collects the original engravings from 19th-Century dictionaries into a new pictures-only dictionary (original review). Pictorial Webster’s satisfies my hunger for visual list-making that probably grew out of picture book dictionaries from my childhood, and now extends to things like Blackstock’s Collections and the work of Tom Gauld.
And speaking of Tom Gauld, his The Gigantic Robot was another instant favourite of the year. His usual mix of subtle humour and minimalist drawings are used here to tell a parable about war, futility, and decay. It may not be a meaty book, but Tom manages to say more with 15 single-panel pages than some cartoonists do with entire graphic novels. Visit Tom Gauld’s website.
R. Crumb’s visual, literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis is certainly the most impressive comics project of the year, if not the decade. I usually try to avoid such hyperbole but, even though Crumb claims to have treated this adaptation as an impartial word-for-word illustration job, we must appreciate the context of such a book. That context is not only one of Crumb’s kingly status in the pantheon of underground comics–psyche-driven comics of sex, drugs, desire, and the antiestablishment–but a modern world in which the origins of life on earth are a highly-politicized battle between Darwinian Science and the Hand of God. In this context, a literal adaptation of the bible’s first book–a story of how we came to be–is a statement in itself.
Quoting my original review:
Anyone familiar with GigPosters.com knows it’s the site for modern music posters. And with the CD going the way of the LP, and its cover art with it, these posters are fast becoming some bands and artists’ primary means of representing their music visually.
The Gig Posters book features over 700 posters, 101 of which are full-page. And it’s a true poster book; each page is perforated and ready to be torn out and hung on your wall.
It’s a terrific resource for how contemporary designers are fusing illustration, typography, and reinvigorating the world of the poster.
Inspired by the likes of Saul Bass and Charley Harper, the contemporary artists featured in Naïve all embrace the virtues of modernism and minimalist design–simplicity, restriction, patterns, and shapes–and even if the work was made with the aid of a computer, the pieces all boast an aesthetic that seems to say, “this was made with my own two hands.” Like the Gig Posters book, this is an invaluable source of inspiration for designer-illustrators and printmakers, featuring favourites of mine like Tad Carptenter, Matte Stephens, Linzie Hunter, and Nate Williams.
That brings us to Charley Harper himself. There’s not much I can say about this smaller affordable version of its larger, more expensive counterpart, that I haven’t already said in my initial review, but I can once again stress that if you had put off purchasing the original behemoth of An Illustrated Life because of its size or pricetag, you have little reason to avoid adding it to your collection any longer. Charley Harper’s work is modernist, abstracted illustration at its best.
I’ll start by stating that I didn’t love the story, or the characters in Asterios Polyp. But I am a sucker for formalism in comics and artists that play with the medium itself. Usually, cartoonists’ forays into form-bending rarely sustain full-length stories. But in Asterios Polyp we may have the first true formalist graphic novel–a story actually about style and duality that exploits form, motif, colour, and line to their fullest, in a way that could only be achieved in comics.
Seth’s serialized story for the New York Times Magazine is collected here in a gorgeous volume, which makes the wait for the next Clyde Fans book a little more bearable. Mixing mid-Century Canadiana with death and the passing of time, Sprott is pure Seth through-and-through. The panels are rich in the warm, monotone colours befitting a tale of nostalgia and the oversized pages allow Seth to showcase some of the best-designed page layouts of his career.
Fans of webcomics darling Kate Beaton finally got a book this year, collecting Kate’s hilarious comics featuring historical figures (if not historical fact). Kate’s expressive characters are up there with the best of Jules Feiffer’s work, and it is always a good day when my RSS reader gives way to one of her comics. Guaranteed to be the only book on your shelf featuring Tesla, Napoleon, AND Stompin’ Tom Connors!
In this memoir, illustrator David Small tells the harrowing story of a childhood spent with unloving parents and the cancer they unintentionally gave him, and subsequently kept a secret from him. A quick but engrossing read, Stitches features some of the most vivid images of childhood to be realized on the comics page, and several truly stunning wordless sequences–appropriate for a story of a child who loses his voice, and finds it again in his ability to draw.
Monsters almost didn’t make the cut this year, and only because I didn’t read it until just a few days ago, when it quickly secured itself a position on this list. Ken Dahl/Gabby Schulz’s semi-autobiographical graphic novel about herpes is a cautionary tale for, as Jeffrey Brown writes on the back cover, “anyone who has had sex, is going to have sex, or wants to have sex.”
Honourable mentions: Jeffrey Brown’s Funny Misshapen Body, R.O. Blechman’s Talking Lines, Denis Kitchen’s Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics into Comix, and R. Sikoryak’s Masterpiece Comics.
See also: Matt’s Picks for 2009
Last year’s lists: Matt’s Picks / John’s Picks
